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Address lookup with Sensis

Having helped a bunch of Partners and businesses get onto Xero from other products it amazed me that their contact lists can be in such a state, not necessarily wrong, but just poorly stored – a mind numbing job to clean it all up.

What we’ve released today for Australian customers should greatly help with this. You’ll remember we added address lookup features to New Zealand organisations earlier this year and today we’ve added this for Australian organisations too. When you lookup addresses with the service in Xero, not only will it greatly reduce data entry, but the formatting is taken care of too.

We’ve worked with Sensis TotalCheck on this and there’s a few reasons why. First and foremost it’s because we complement each other. We’re both committed to helping small business in Australia and committed to connecting businesses online and in the cloud.

Secondly, Sensis TotalCheck uses White Pages as one of its data sources. White Pages is a rich data source, constantly updated and holds more than 7 million business and residential listings. Names, addresses, phone numbers are stored against them as well. Sensis TotalCheck also uses the Australia Post Postal Address File (PAF) as an address datasource, so in the unlikely event your lookup doesn’t find a match from Sensis, the PAF will be searched automatically and addresses looked up from there instead.

Lastly (but maybe this should be firstly) we really wanted to offer small businesses access to the same quality address services as big business. We’re proud that we’re the only online accounting product to offer this service with Sensis TotalCheck – possibly the first small business accounting provider to do this worldwide? (I’m willing to be corrected on this).

It’s exciting to think where this could take us. Future developments could include retrieving phone numbers for matched names and addresses. Other initiatives we’re looking at with the team at Sensis are ABN retrieval and email address retrieval. Imagine that!

What would be great is to have this integration for every country you service integrated for all accounts.
EG: I enter a NZ address from my Australian Xero account and it looks up through the NZ method.

Another feature I would love to see is checking the GST registration of an ABN from the Australian Business Register (ABR). Then, if a client claimed an input tax credit from a supplier who is not registered for GST, the anomaly could be reported on an exceptions report for investigation.

This is a great feature. Until I dropped by this thread I could not work out how it worked. Yes I could see something was happening, but nothing ever happened. I interpreted the Find Address field to mean…Find Address of Bunnings / Coles / Bakery store … so I have repeatedly entered the businesses NAME thinking it would locate that way …. and kept waiting in anticipation as nothing would happen doh! Once you know to start entering the actual address, not the name of the biz it is easy. I agree with all the comments above.